Let's start with our first example under the discussion on the "Purpose of the Tool" (above). You can either type your first line into the large gray text-box area or, if you have it in your VB dev. environment already, just copy it there and paste it in using the "Paste Basis Below" button. Now enter your start value. Let's say you want "TextBox1.text = Array(nj,1)" through "TextBox12.text = Array(nj,12)." The "start value" is one and the "final value" is twelve. Enter these two values into the two text boxes to the right of the "Paste Basis Below" button. Now you need a "Flag Value/Start" entry. In our example, you can use "ox1.t" or "nj,1)" as your value...either will work because they surround the "1" you want to step-change. Now you can click the "Process Gen" button to change one side of the equation and generate the stepped (on one side) statements. Hence, you'll have values from one through 12 on one side but the other side will remain unchanged. (Notice that if you're only going to use this step, then decide to redo it, you'll need to click the "Again" button to avoid a "screw up."

Now, your start value and your finish value won't change, but the "Flag Value/Start" must change to be the one you did not use before--in our example, either "ox1.t" or "nj,1)" will work. (Note that you must use at least one character after the numeric value for this part of the operation and it must be a non-blank, printable characer--the ".t" or the ")" exemplify this.) When you've changed the "Flag Value/Start" click the "Secondary" button. Voila! Your code is generated for you.

Now, we recommend that you make it a habit to click the "Copy to Clipboard" button, paste the code into your developer environment, and think about whether you need the reverse equalities or not. We've found that about 90% of the time you will even if you don't know it yet. Hence, we recommend that you now click the "Copy to Clipboard" button and then click the button in the middle of the controls section to "Gen Reverse Equalities." If you don't think you need it yet, just copy it to the clipboard, paste it into your code, highlight it, and comment it out until you need it...betcha it's sooner than you expected!

When you're finished, you can just hit the light-green button and go about your business.

The button to "Process Edit" will let you make the stepped changes shown in examples 3 and 4. You'll need to enter your start value, your finish value, and your Flag Value/Start value, then click the button.

Notice the "Prepend" and "Append" buttons. These will let you add stuff to the code in the large gray text box area--either at the start of each line or at the end of each line. As before, just paste the code into the box, enter what you want to prepend or append, then click the appropriate button to do it. Notice that the tool does not care whether this is VB code, C# Code, or just plain old text. That makes it handy for a number of different things.

This little menu is designed, again, to relieve your typing woes--and help your memory as you age. These are options that will generate small bits of code we wind up doing often and facing the, "I don't want to go through figuring that out again, but I can't quite remember which program I did it in." We'll be adding others to it as they come up or are suggested by our user audience. The code generated will be in the large gray text box so you can copy it to the clipboard and then paste it into your Dev. environment for immediate usage.